To ask, or not to ask, that is the question - Mon 14th July

A question of questions

We teachers ask a lot of questions. Sometimes too many, sometimes not the right ones, sometimes we do it thoughtlessly, sometimes they are just lifted, sometimes they are referential, sometimes they are divergent…Stop stop stop!!!

Why ask questions?

We teachers ask them to check learners have understood (Which path did Snow white take?), to guide them notice, to stimulate language use for example in discussion and writing, to stimulate learners to remember (What did Snow white do when she entered the house?) and to think more deeply (How would the story have been different if Snow white hadn’t eaten the apple?). We ask questions to assess prior knowledge and to engage learners in the topic, or to encourage personalisation and personal response (Which dwarf mirrors your attitude?) and to guide them to form hypotheses. We ask questions to get feedback (what did you think if the story?), simply.

When it comes to language and to life, it’s the question that matters. When it comes to teaching and learning, it’s paramount to clearly understand if the question we are asking will guide the learners to develop strategies and skills or will simply assess their comprehension, if the question we are asking is meant to elicit personal response and a deeper analysis or it’s just meant to assess that they have understood.

There are different types of questions:

• Display questions – the person who asks the question already knows the answer, those are used to elicit prior knowledge and to check comprehension;
• Referential questions – they are used to encourage the sharing of opinions, the questioner may not know the answer: “What do you think…?”;
• Closed questions (aka Convergent) – they have one correct answer or a couple of correct options, the answers here is predictable and often calls just on memory;
• Open-ended questions (aka Divergent) – they are used to fully encourage opinions, to make inferences and predictions, to summarise.

When it comes to questions, as teachers we should always refer to Bloom’s Taxonomy and try to stimulate the higher-order thinking skills rather than the lower-order ones (Remember).

We should also follow what Mike Gershon summarises in his blog about questions: we should differentiate through questioning.
According to Gershon, this is possible when we ask the learner to show and convince us about why their answer is right and dig deeper by trying to get to the bottom of what our learners think, by exploring the foundations underpinning their thinking (what do you mean by that? How does that relate to the question? What evidence do you have for that?...); we should differentiate when we make their knowledge provisional to make learning a constant building-up of meaning and sense. If we want our learners to develop critical thinking, one way of doing it is by presenting knowledge as provisional using “might” for example. Gershon states that “What might democracy be?” instead of “What is democracy?” encourages the learners to assess, examine, reason and analyse, as in the former case the students are able to arrive individually or as a group at answers based on critical thinking. With this approach, the teacher is able to elicit information about what their learners think and can use it to improve and develop learning thanks to a spiralling process. Moreover, the students are pushed to examine a topic critically and obliged to make assumptions and justify their ideas, as a result they are subjecting any idea or topic to analysis and evaluation to build up meaning and knowledge.

In the end, the most important questions are the questions we ask ourselves before and while preparing an activity, though. I feel I ought to become more aware of those too. Some examples of these questions are

• Why am I asking this question?
• Is this question clear and effective?
• Is it answerable? Can it be misinterpreted?
• Does it improve strategies and skills?
• Does this question lead to learning?
• Is the amount of learning worth the effort?

References

Johanna Stirling, A question of questions, article
https://mycourses.nile-elt.com/pluginfile.php/145780/mod_resource/content/7/Questions%20article%203.4A.pdf

Mike Gershon’s blog https://mikegershon.com/what-makes-a-good-question/